FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

The price of ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, is up more than 10% in the past twenty-four hours.

ETH is trading hands at roughly $597 on Coinbase as of the time of writing, a day-over-day increase of just over 11%. According to data published by TradingView, the day’s high on Coinbase is $598.99.

The price development comes as the contract deposit address for Eth2’s Phase 0 launch — which will usher in the first leg of a multi-stage process — continues to accrue funds. AS shown in the chart below, the address has seen a notable uptick in deposits since November 20.

As previously reported, that address needs to accrue 524,288 ETH for the launch to occur on the earliest possible date, December 1. According to EtherScan, 322,912 ETH — an amount worth roughly $191.5 million — has been deposited as of the time of writing.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The Ethereum 2.0 staking deposit contract has reached 60% of the threshold needed for Phase 0 launch, as of this writing.

The remaining 40% of the target must be met by Tuesday 12 UTC (7:30 am EST), for the Eth2 Phase 0 launch to happen on its earliest possible date, i.e., December 1.

The staking contract has so far attracted 314,656 ETH in deposits, out of the required 524,288 ETH. The deposits have grown sharply over the last three days. It remains to be seen whether 100% of the target can be achieved by tomorrow or whether it is delayed — until the target is reached at a later time.

Once the deposit threshold is reached, the beacon chain — which will serve as a kind of backbone for the Eth2 blockchain network, will go live.

Once the beacon chain gets activated, the Eth2 transition process will move on to the next stage of its multi-phase approach, to complete the full upgrade.

The development of Eth2 has been in the works for years. Once fully completed, the blockchain will cease its proof-of-work model and function as a proof-of-stake network.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Andre Cronje, the founder of the popular decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Yearn.Finance, has introduced a new project.

Dubbed Deriswap, Cronje’s new protocol combines different segments of DeFi — swaps, options, and loans — into one platform.

“Deriswap allows for a consolidated, capital efficient market for trading, Options, Futures, and Loans, allowing LPs [liquidity providers] to keep their exposure and enjoy additional fees and rewards,” Cronje said in a blog post published Monday.

Deriswap is currently under audit, and its other details, including a specific launch date, remain scant.

When contacted, Cronje told The Block that more information would be released after the audit of the protocol. The blog post has been published in order to kickstart discussions with relevant builders, said Cronje.

When Cronje launched Yearn.Finance — a yield optimization protocol, in July of this year, it quickly rose in popularity. Yearn’s governance token, YFI, once hit an all-time high of more than $43,000, according to tracker CoinGecko. YFI is currently trading at around $25,000.

It is not clear whether Deriswap will have its own token. Cronje declined to provide details at this stage of the protocol.

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

ZKSwap, a token swap protocol being built on ethereum’s layer-2 scaling technology ZK-rollups, has raised $1.7 million in an angel round.

L2 Lab, the firm behind the project, said in a press release on Monday that the round – closed last week – was led by Bixin Capital, the investment arm of Bixin, a long-time bitcoin miner and wallet operator in China.

Other investors include Chinese crypto and equity funds such as SNZ Capital, FBG Capital, and Longling Capital.

The decentralized exchange protocol is based on ZK-rollups, a solution to scale the transaction capacity on ethereum by adopting the so-called zero-proof technology. The goal is to solve issues like high transaction fees and low throughput to improve the user experience at decentralized exchanges.  

“As Vitalik mentions, rollups will be the dominant scaling solution for Ethereum in the next few years. Among all the rollup solutions, we believe ZK-Rollup is the best implementation,” Alex Lee, the project lead behind the protocol, said in the release.

The firm said ZKSwap launched a test version on ethereum’s testnet Ropsten on November 16 before it can stabilize and roll out officially on the ethereum mainnet. 

© 2020 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.